Domestic violence is the root of 'Drowning Girls'

Miranda Herbert, from left, Patricia Duran and Courtney Lomelo star in "The Drowning Girls," be presented by Mildred's Umbrella Theatre.

Miranda Herbert, from left, Patricia Duran and Courtney Lomelo star in "The Drowning Girls," be presented by Mildred's Umbrella Theatre.

Photo: Jon Harvey

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Above, Miranda Herbert, from left, Patricia Duran and Courtney Lomelo star in the Mildred's Umbrella Theatre Company production of "The Drowning Girls." Left, Duran emerges from the water.

Above, Miranda Herbert, from left, Patricia Duran and Courtney Lomelo star in the Mildred's Umbrella Theatre Company production of "The Drowning Girls." Left, Duran emerges from the water.

Photo: Gentle Bear Photography

Domestic violence is the root of 'Drowning Girls'

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Not a night on television goes by without the death of a woman. Serial killers, stranglers, stalkers, and sociopaths, fictional and real, parade across our channels leaving a trail of voiceless bodies.

A night at Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company's "The Drowning Girls" offers audience three such women: dead, yes, but with plenty to say.

This performance of Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson, and Daniela Vlaskalic's innovative play marks the centenary of the 1915 conviction and hanging of George Joseph Smith, serial killer and bigamist, who married and murdered Alice Burnham, Margaret Lofty and Bessie Mundy, often referred to as "the Brides in the Bath."

Jon Harvey directs Patricia Duran, Courtney Lomelo, and Miranda Herbert as the brides - Alice, Bessie, and Margaret respectively - all of whom fell victim to Smith, who seduced and bullied his way through seven marriages and a series of petty crimes before graduating to serial killing.

Smith was caught only because his landlord noticed a strange similarity between the death of Smith's current wife, unexpectedly in the bath, and news reports of two other women dying under similar suspicious circumstances.

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Smith's conviction for Bessie's murder came only because of new forensic techniques and what was then a novel legal strategy to use the suspicious deaths of the other women to establish a pattern.

Pattern is what is most painful to observe in this story, a story about so many women subject to cycles of violence they could not escape. As much as these women were Smith's victims, they were also at the mercy of their own loneliness and need.

"These women wanted love so badly," said Duran, who plays Bessie. "How horrific and brutal it was after they thought they found it. It's tragic. These women were in love with him and were hopeful."

Artistic director Jennifer Decker was drawn to "The Drowning Girls" by precisely this facet of the work. "It seemed the playwrights were representing female victims in general," she said. "We're dealing with a time when women had less power over their own lives. And we're dealing with a man who was very smooth and who targeted spinsters. There was a shortage of men in England then after World War I, so a lot of women were in this predicament."

The eeriness of "The Drowning Girl" rests in both how common and how contemporary this early 20th-century tale really is.

"The most chilling moment is when the three of us are delivering the same lines simultaneously," Duran said. "It shows how these women share the same story and how he manipulated them. Even the letters they wrote to their families are nearly identical."

Certainly the production also takes seriously just how contemporary "The Drowning Girls" is. The question of why women stay with violent men still perplexes 100 years later.

"The victim never really sees it," Duran said. "The people around them can."

Thus the company will host post-show discussions after performances on July 23 and July 30 with experts on domestic violence from the Harris County District Attorney's Office, the Houston Area Women's Center, and the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council.

Though "the Brides in the Bath" have been featured on television and on the stage before, "The Drowning Girls" makes a series of unusual choices about this material, which suits Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company. "It fits our mission perfectly," Decker said. "It's very much the kind we love to do: It's experimental, female-driven and a little dark."

"The Drowning Girls" may have the feel of documentary at times, but it is very much driven by the odd shape memory can take. "The play isn't linear," Decker said. "It combines the three women's stories. He married them one at a time, but the women are meshed together as one. Two deaths can happen simultaneously."

These three women spend most of the play in the bathtubs in which they met their ends. Duran says this construct speaks to the women's shared circumstances: "three different worlds but so connected, and we're diving in and out of each other's bathtubs."

While each actress plays one of the brides in the bath, they also play all the other parts, including, at times, Smith himself.

Duran says this offers one of her most important challenges. "I remember practicing the lines out loud the first time in my apartment, alone, and I was terrified by the voice that came out. We've had several of those moments in the rehearsal. It's like diving into pure arrogance and tapping into something very selfish, evil, greedy, mean."

In a culture obsessed with serial killers and saturated by violence, it is all too easy to fall in familiar patterns to represent crime and its victims. The innovative strategies of "The Drowning Girls" seem to tackle this problem.

"There's not a lot of sentimentality about the victims," Decker said. "They're already dead and telling the story from beyond. They actually find humor in the various situations going on. They don't play the victim."